


Silent Call

by unicornpoe



Series: (I'm) One of the Dirty Guns [3]
Category: Knives Out (2019)
Genre: Aftercare, Coming Untouched, Dom/sub, F/M, Femdom, Fluff and Smut, Heavy Petting, Kissing, Library Sex, Oral Sex, Rain, Resolved Sexual Tension, he's her trophy wife, ransom is just a little submissive thot in love, the fact that i'm posting this on valentine's day is absolutely hilarious to me, we all know who that tag applies to
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-14
Updated: 2020-02-14
Packaged: 2021-02-27 20:20:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22721596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unicornpoe/pseuds/unicornpoe
Summary: She wanted him to know this: I’m here, and you’re here, and you belong to me. I’m in all of your senses.She wanted him to know this, too: And you’re in all of mine.*Marta acts upon her feelings. Ransom is more than alright with this.
Relationships: Marta Cabrera/Ransom Drysdale
Series: (I'm) One of the Dirty Guns [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1588981
Comments: 51
Kudos: 626





	Silent Call

**Author's Note:**

> sex happens. this is surprisingly soft, considering the fact that somebody gets slapped in it. (i'm sure i don't need to tell you who is the slapper and who is the slapee. please tell me i don't need to explain this.)
> 
> i can't believe i'm still writing this. i can smell the flames of hell from where i sit. i am living life on the edge and it is glorious.

Here was the strange thing: his quietness. 

Ransom seemed content to do nothing more than sit by her side, a neat foot between them, his hands folded in his lap and his head tipped back to rest on the back of the couch. Quiet, unless she asked him not to be. Eyes warm and heavy-lidded when he looked at her. 

It was startlingly easy to exist with him in her space. More surprising than that: it was… nice. 

Marta watched him from her armchair, peering over the top of her book. 

Like Marta, Ransom was doing his best to read all of Harlan’s books. It had been his idea. He’d followed her up here one day, footsteps mild, and gone to stand in front of her bookshelf of novels she’d finished with his hands clasped behind his back. 

“You can read them,” she’d said, and he’d tipped a glance at her, his mouth soft in the amber glow of the lamplight she preferred to read by. Her breath had caught in her chest. She wasn’t sure why. “If you want. I don’t mind.”

That’s what he was doing now. 

He was sitting at Marta’s feet with his legs crossed, leaned up against the bookshelf to her left. His head was bent, and his hair was dark, shadows woven with light. The arch of his neck above his collar caught her eye. Bared and soft and undefensive. 

She just watched him breathe for a moment. How slowly he did it; easy inhale and exhale, small movements of that chest under muted-blue wool. 

There was another chair across the room, but he wasn’t sitting in it. He had chosen here. Here, on the floor, at her feet. Not touching her, because she hadn’t told him to. 

Sometimes, this subtle pressure that built and built inside Marta when she looked at him was almost too much for her to bear. 

“Ransom,” she said quietly. 

He looked up at her slowly. Emerging from beneath still waters, blinking heavy eyelashes like sparrow wings. 

This was how he got. Calm and still and slowed down when she let him be with her, content just to exist in this same place. Because she wanted him there. 

She thought about the summer Ransom had spent as Harlan’s research assistant, back during Marta’s very first year at the house. How he had filled this space so differently than he did now. All restrained indignation that he was being made to do this, and a boiling kind of hate that made Marta equal parts sorrowful and afraid. 

She barely saw any traces of that man in him right now. Certainly not when he smiled. 

“What’s up?” he said. He marked his place in the book with the edge of his thumb. If the books had been his, he would have treated them carelessly, but they were hers. He didn’t even crack the spines. 

Suddenly she knew she wouldn’t be able to find words for what she wanted to say. 

“Nothing,” she said. If she reached out right now and touched that place on his skin that was glowing gold with firelight, he wouldn’t pull away. It would be soft. Warm. She might feel the thrum of blood beneath his flesh.

Marta didn’t lean forward. She gripped her own book a little too tightly. 

The two of them had existed in a nebulous space of phone calls and in-between miles for years, and they’d gotten to know each other so well that neither of them could ever manage to hide anything from the other. That was the problem, when two people who said more in their silences than their words met each other. 

That angle of his eyebrows. “Alright?”

Yes. Yes, and I want to kiss you. 

“Go back to your book,” she said, and then, when he had slid those eyes away, when he was sufficiently wrapped up in the story and might not make a big deal of it, Marta stretched one leg out toward him. 

He didn’t precisely look up. But he curled his palm around the bone of her ankle, fingers wrapping one by one, and she watched him shiver on a sigh. 

  
  
  


Ransom stepped out onto the balcony, two cups of coffee steaming in his hands. He passed one to her. 

She took it, and made sure to smile as she did. They both leaned against the railing, close but not touching. 

The trees were on fire with fall. 

“So,” she said. 

Morning. It was the tail end of November, but the sun was out in full measure, and the two of them had wrapped up in their coats and scarves, eager to soak up the last bit of warmth. 

Marta couldn’t help but remember that phone call from a year ago, that one that had taken place out here: talk of loneliness, and empty rooms. 

“So,” he said. He wasn’t looking at her, but when she leaned into him, he leaned back. 

She never felt small, standing next to him, even though he was so much physically larger than she was. It felt. It just felt right. 

“Winter break is coming up.”

His eyebrows lifted. Still, he didn’t look at her. 

“That’s true,” he said. 

She knocked her shoulder into his—a sharp edge, turned muted at the last minute—before settling back against him. Looking out over the leaf-strewn grass, she heard his quiet laugh.

“I know what you’re getting at,” he added after a moment. His hands looked big around the mug he was using. “I’m just—”

“An asshole,” she filled in helpfully. 

Another laugh, and his eyes met hers this time, and she watched his mouth slide into a grin, wry and true. “Yep,” he said, popping the P. Teasing, so she knew they were on the same page.

This strange ways they spoke to each other. Meanings layered beneath words and movements and sharp, cut-away glances. 

The beat and the mingle of their breath. 

“So Alicia’s going to be here some of the time.”

“And I’m going to be good,” he said. 

“Oh,” said Marta. She wanted to laugh, a bit, and she also wanted to slide her palm along the length of his arm until she reached his hand, to tangle their fingers together. “Yes. That’s good.”

He shifted. A movement small enough that she wouldn’t have seen it if they weren’t standing like this, if they weren’t close like this, closer than they’d been that night that he’d shown up. That night he’d said that he loved her. That night she’d kissed him. 

They hadn’t done that again. Kissed. They hadn’t done it because he never touched her unless she told him to, and she— 

She didn’t know why. 

No, not true: she knew why. 

Because she knew that if she kissed him again, she wouldn’t be able to stop. 

But now, here, he shifted. Spine straightening, just a little. Shoulders wide. 

He liked when she said that. Called him good. It was a simple, easy thing, a phrase that didn’t take anything out of her to say—so small that the reward felt bigger than the effort she put into it. 

The reward: his cheeks gone red, his breath gone short. 

Marta liked knowing that she could do that to him. 

  
  
  


She met Detective Blanc at a warehouse in town. 

“Twenty-four hours ago,” said Blanc instead of greeting her, and handed Marta a pair of rubber gloves. “The body of Miss Janet Aberdale was found here.”

Marta slid her gloves on. She waited patiently for Blanc to get to the root of the mystery, the real reason he was here: he liked drama and she knew that. She’d let him pontificate for a bit if he wanted to. 

Blanc led her around the edges of the room. It was a big warehouse, with high ceilings and towers of flat crates making a maze-like labyrinth out of the place. The flat gray concrete beneath their feet echoed as they moved. 

“Nothing but a banana, a hammer, and a radio were present at the scene when Detective Elliot arrived today,” Blanc said. “And the body, of course.”

Marta glanced to the corner, where Detective Elliot was leaned against the wall with his arms crossed, watching Blanc with a weird mix of fondness, respect, and frustration on his face. She grinned quietly. 

“Miss Aberdale is assuredly dead,” Blanc rambled. Marta narrowed her eyes at him. He always had a point; she had a feeling she wouldn’t like this one. “But if she had lived, I’m sure she wouldn’t invite her attempted murderer to move in with her. Ahem.”

He had his thumbs hooked in his pockets, glowering down at the chalk outline of Janet Aberdale’s body with forced concentration. 

Marta frowned. 

“Blanc,” she said sternly. 

He glanced at her sideways, quick, but long enough that this worry swinging in her chest—she liked Blanc, she respected him, and she would hate for him to judge her for this—to settle a little. He was grinning. The grin was strangely admiring. 

“My only point, Miss Cabrera,” he continued, making a sharp-stepped circle around the outline, “is that I would be greatly angry if my brightest and kindest assistant was murdered in her bed by a spoiled asshole with a penchant for temper tantrums.”

Marta thought of Ransom, and the way he sat at her feet, and his big hands resting passively on a book. Marta thought of Ransom, telling her that he would be good, and the way he listened to her. Every single time. Marta said, “I don’t think that’s something that I have to worry about.”

There must have been something in her voice. In the tilt of her head. 

“Oh,” said Blanc. He blinked. “Oh my.”

Marta felt her face going hot. “Yes,” she said faintly. 

Blanc watched her for a long moment. And then his lips twisted upward in that smile. “Well,” he said. “Lord knows he isn’t an eyesore.”

Marta stared at him. “Blanc!”

“What?” The detective was grinning. “I am not blind, Miss Cabrera. I don’t like him, but I also don’t mind looking at him.”

Marta laughed. What else could she do? “Yeah,” she said. “I’ve been there.” 

  
  
  


Marta’s mother visited occasionally. It was disorienting, all of this: how normal it was. 

She didn’t like Ransom—understandable; he had wanted to murder her daughter, and was generally pretty awful in a lot of ways—but she didn’t hate him, and it was very obvious that Ransom didn’t know what to do with this. 

He was used to extremes, Marta thought. Everyone either hated him or worshipped him. Wanted to kill him, or had been killed by him. 

He had no idea what to do with generic passivity. 

“ _ Buenos días,”  _ Mama said one morning, letting herself in with the key she still had from her time living here. 

Marta was in the living room right of the foyer, laptop open across her thighs, trying to figure out how to politely decline an invitation to a charity ball but still donate. 

Ransom was still upstairs. He slept in a room a few doors down from Marta’s. He was not a morning person. 

Marta shut her laptop with a grateful snap, setting it aside and greeting her mother with a kiss on the cheek. “ _ Buenos días, _ Mama,” she said, taking a crate full of foil-wrapped casserole dishes away from her and leading the way to the kitchen. “You’re here early.”

Mama took the crate back from Marta, only to sit it down in the middle of the kitchen island. “You know your sister,” she said. “Never on time. Always early or late. I have to prepare.”

Prepare: cook a three-course meal simply because Alicia was coming home for break and that apparently needed to be celebrated with food. 

“Alright,” Marta said. Mama had already leapt into action; pulling out all of Marta’s pots and pans, setting her oven, spreading out ingredients on the island. 

“Good, then,” said Marta, and went to make coffee. 

She took a seat at the table when it was done, sipping quietly as she watched her mother work. It was comforting. Called to mind memories of her childhood, Mama using any occasion to cook something special. 

“Where is he?” Mama asked after a while. She was kneading some sort of dough, and her arms were flour-dusted from palm to elbow. She flicked a glance up at Marta, eyebrow raised. 

Marta took a drink. “Sleeping, probably,” she said. 

Mama’s eyebrows continued to be raised. Marta didn’t know if she wanted to laugh or sigh in frustration. “Not helping you around the house? Not doing his part?”

Mama didn’t quite understand why Marta had told Ransom to come here. She knew that Marta had visited him, and that Marta had talked to him on the phone; she didn’t know that Marta had driven him state-wide, that Marta had held his hand in a visitation room, that Marta had heard the words  _ I’m in love with you  _ and hadn’t turned him away, or even been surprised. 

She got up to refill her coffee, squeezing Mama’s arm in passing. “He would if I asked him to,” Marta said gently. Reassuringly, she hoped. “He does.” 

Mama huffed, but Marta could tell she wanted to smile. What strange wars they were all fighting. 

He wandered in on sleep-shuffling feet as Marta was pouring her second cup. Plain t-shirt, a little wrinkled. Sweatpants. His hair sticking up in the back, and she hid her smile in a drink, thinking of what he’d say if he could see himself right now. Ransom, who always wanted to look perfect. 

Ransom, who looked soft and sleep-blurred and a little out of it as he came toward her. 

She wanted to slide her hands around the spaces between his hips and his ribs. She wanted to touch all of his spaces between. 

Soft sliding curve, covered by cotton. Warm and a little tender, before hand hit muscle and bone. 

They probably looked funny, standing here next to each other. Marta, in her dress and tall socks and cardigan. Ransom in his pajamas. 

He gave her mother a politely restrained nod when he saw her. Mama did the same. 

Marta rolled her eyes. 

“Morning,” he said to Marta, quiet enough to be a murmur if she thought about it, coming up beside her. Hovering, but not touching. His hands were folded on the lip of the counter, and she was holding the coffee pot, but he wasn’t asking for it. 

Why was it these small things? These little deferences that quickened her heartbeat?

She stretched up on her toes to grab his mug from the cabinet, and then she poured for him. They both watched the liquid rising slowly, stopping right below the rim when she pulled her hand away. 

“Morning,” she said, and passed him the mug. She let their fingers brush. 

Marta didn’t look at him until she’d nearly turned away. When she did, he was soft-eyed and smiling. 

  
  
  


Alicia arrived in a flurry of slush from outside, half rain, half early-December snow. She hugged Marta and Mama tightly, and flipped Ransom off with an acceptable level of intent and a sliding smirk at the corner of her mouth. 

He was standing at Marta’s back, hands in his pockets. He was perfectly willing to take one hand out and return the gesture. 

“Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to know nice people,” Marta sighed, and then Ransom said “You wouldn’t like it,” and she laughed, because he was right. 

  
  


By the time Marta’s family left, the sun had dipped away below the trees. 

She didn’t stand at the door and watch their cars disappear down the driveway. She didn’t wait with her eyes closed, cringing at the empty sound of her house. 

Because her house wasn’t empty. 

Ransom was in the library downstairs. 

The echoes of her footsteps were quiet as she made her way through the halls, across mismatched carpets, over shining old-wood floor. Marta thought about the day they’d all just lived through: Marta thought about standing in the kitchen with her mother and her sister and her… and him. The way everything had been almost normal—or at least normal enough to bear. 

It was still raining. Marta’s favorite kind of weather, especially here on this hill. Here in the woods. 

It was late, and the house  _ was _ quiet, but it was a quiet that was lived in. It was the quietness of space between breaths, of the last sliver of someone’s irises before their eyes fell shut.

A rolling tide of thunder above the roof. 

Marta tugged her cardigan a little more tightly around herself as she walked. Blocking out any lingering chill. Concentrated on the solid incoming of her own breath, because there was something forming in her mind, a thought, a resolution, and she could feel the conviction of it quivering all the way through her fingertips— 

“Oh fuck, shit, sorry—”

Ransom ran into her as she made the curve from the hallway to the library, his hands coming to her hips. 

She could have stepped away. 

Marta let the crash happen. Her palms braced on his chest, the fingertips of one hand grazing that velvet-warm skin at the base of his neck. Her face a few inches from his. 

He wasn’t breathing. She could feel him against her, all of him—his chest his hips his knees his hands his shoulders his elbows his pale exposed neck—and his lungs were still. 

Ransom’s eyes were huge, staring down at her. He hadn’t taken his hands away from her hips. 

“I,” he murmured, and then stopped, and thunder cracked again, louder this time, and she thought about tracing the shape of cheekbone beneath his skin with the pout of her lips, “I was coming to find you.”

“Ransom,” she said. She moved one hand down to rest over his galloping heart. He was wearing a worn t-shirt, some pale color that she couldn’t discern in the half-light spilling out from the library fire, and the fabric was just soft enough against her hand to echo the promise of skin beneath it. “Breathe.”

He breathed. A shuddering pull of air. Marta slid the hand she had resting at his collar up a few centimeters. Didn’t stop until the crook of her thumb and pointer finger was draped around the base of his neck, her other fingers just grazing his nape. 

“What do you want?” she asked him. She needed to hear it. She knew—but she needed to hear it. 

Those two bright spots of color, high up on his cheeks. Burning, fevered red. 

He tried to say her name, but no sound came out, not the first time. It was like he couldn’t remember words. It was like she had made him forget. 

“You know,” he said at last. His voice was a limp and feathered thing. “You know what I want.”

Marta’s hands on him. Marta’s hands tightening, just a little. 

She’d breathe him in if she could. 

“Say it.”

He closed his eyes. She let him. Golden fronds for eyelashes, opaque against flushed skin. 

“I want to do what you want me to do,” he said at last. “I want you to—to tell me…”

This feeling in her chest. Tight and bundled and tangled, a thousand threads poised so that if he tugged on any of them, they’d unravel in a heartbeat. 

She hadn’t known she could feel like this. 

“Go on,” she murmured. “Keep going.”

Marta could feel him swallow, feel the movement of his throat against her palm. 

“Marta,” he said, then truly couldn’t say anything else. When he opened his eyes, the blue shocked her. 

Something snapped loose. 

Marta shoved up onto her toes and kissed him. 

He made a soft punched-out noise when her mouth slid across his, like a fist to the sternum; he pulled her closer, hands on her hips, fingers indenting her skin through the plush weave of her sweater, breath as ragged-ended as those broken threads between them, and— 

“Stop,” said Marta. 

He did. Immediately. His hands fell to his sides, his lips fell away from hers. 

Marta thought of the instant before a car crash: that inevitable slowness, that freezing blip in time. 

That had not been entirely what she’d meant. She hadn’t wanted him to let go—just to understand that he wasn’t the one who could pull. But the totality with which he obeyed her, the immediacy of his reaction, the muffled-desperate look he was wearing—Marta was honest enough to admit that it did something to her. 

She wanted him to know this:  _ I’m here, and you’re here, and you belong to me. I’m in all of your senses.  _

She wanted him to know this, too:  _ And you’re in all of mine.  _

They stood without touching, barely an inch between them, and the air between the quivered like heat waves over a desert. 

Marta reached out and slipped her fingers ‘round his wrist. Slipped them up under clinging sleeve. Felt that tender bundle of sinew and vein and bone beneath her fingertips leaping with a pulse that was matched by the rhythm of his lungs, and knew exactly what she was going to do. 

She didn’t have to tug him at all. He followed her on overeager feet, clumsy with anticipation, with the liquid slowness that had filled up his eyes. 

The fire was still lit in the library. It reflected back at her in the bruise-black of his blown-wide pupils, a glint of gold. 

“Take your clothes off,” said Marta quietly, and let go of him, and stepped back. 

He swallowed. Tight: she saw it shift down the column of his throat. There was sweat at his temples, and his mouth was lax and pink from where she’d kissed him. “Oh my god,” he breathed.

This: this was what  _ she  _ wanted. 

She didn’t even have to say anything to him. Just arched an eyebrow high, her arms crossed over her chest. 

Ransom’s hands shook as he gripped the bottom of his t-shirt and pulled it off up over his head, the curve of his palm pale, the movement of his arms fluid. He let the shirt fall to the ground. Marta let her eyes roam where they wanted to. 

“Good,” she murmured. Pale muscle, the notch of his ribs, dark hair across his chest and leading in a trail from his navel to dip below the waist of his jeans. He was made of up black and white lines, a charcoal drawing. She wanted to bite the curve of his shoulder. “Good, Ransom.”

He shivered, and his skin spilled over into acres of rose-flushed heat, that flush spilling down from his face to his neck to his whole torso. Marta wondered if it stained his thighs, too. God. God, she hoped so. 

Marta lifted her eyes to his face. “Keep going,” she breathed. 

Ransom did. 

He was barefoot, and he stepped out of his jeans and his underwear with a graceless kind of unselfconscious hurry that made Marta’s chest pang, even in the midst of what she was doing to him. He wanted this. He wanted her. He was trusting and eager and obedient, and there was heat pulsing in her belly now, low and loose and warm. 

The line of his spine was knobby and sharp, like a string of pearls pressed up from beneath his skin. 

He was already hard. Achingly so. 

And he was just standing there. Limpid-eyed and trembling in the wait. 

“Come here,” she said to him, sitting back on the lip of the desk. She curled her fingers in the hem of her skirt, nudging it up her thighs, widening the strip of tan flesh exposed between the top of her tall socks and the bottom of her dress. “Hands behind your back.”

Ransom stepped forward into the V of her outstretched legs. Framed by her on either side. 

Marta lifted a hand and pressed it to the bone of his razor-sharp hip. Tugged him another half inch closer, until she could reach the back of his neck and pull him down and press her mouth to his ear. 

“On your knees.”

He dropped. 

_ God, _ she thought, pulling her skirt up, pulling her underwear down. There wasn’t a trace of insolence about him.  _ God, I—  _

He was breathing hard and fast and sharp, his chest rising jagged. His hands were still clasped. She feathered her fingers through his hair, got a good grip; tipped his head back until he looked her in the eyes. 

His breath ghosted over her hot skin. His lips were parted. 

“You know what to do,” she said. A thrill went through her at the sound of her own voice; dark, and low, and ready to be heard. To be listened to. “Don’t you, baby?”

He nodded fast. Winced a little when the movement pulled his hair, eyes wet and red. 

_ Look at you,  _ Marta thought. She would never get tired of seeing him like this: utterly wrecked from almost nothing. From  _ her.  _

“Yeah,” he said, still nodding—he liked it then, didn’t he; that pain—”yeah, yes, Marta.” 

“Good,” she said, touching that place beneath his right eye that had collected a little wetness. She circled her thumb over the circumference of his mouth, light enough that she could barely feel the softness of his lips beneath. “Good boy. Can you do something else for me?”

It was a question, yes, but they both knew there was really only one answer he could give her.

“Anything,” he whispered. 

“Yeah.” She smiled. Pushed her underwear the rest of the way down, first to her knees, then off both ankles. Marta hadn’t let go of him yet. “That’s what I thought.” 

She stopped talking, didn’t tell him what it was. Just held them both there, still and trembling on the inside, her legs spread and her skirt pushed up around her hips, his hands locked behind his back, his skin mottled with color. 

“Marta,” he started, a burst of air, because he was spoiled and insurgent, because he’d never been good at waiting for what he wanted, “please—”

The sound of her palm against his cheek was loud in the quiet room. 

The next sound was a sob. Ransom’s: something tight and wet and uncontrollable, something that made him shake so hard between her legs that she thought he might have come just from that. 

Marta’s hand tingled. There was an even brighter mark of red on his face now, the shape of her palm, the outline of her hand against him. Her heart was galloping in her chest, and he was crying, low, steady tears, his eyes closed, his spine a broken slump. 

Still, he didn’t touch her. 

“Was that ok?” Marta murmured, sliding the hand that was clutching his hair back a little, cradling the back of his skull in her hand. She thought she knew the answer—she prayed she knew the answer—but she wouldn’t do it again, if he didn’t want her to. 

He was a mess. “Yes,” he murmured, over and over again, and she let him tip forward cry quietly into her thigh. His arms were flexing with the urge to reach out and touch her. “God, Marta…”

There was something too tender in the way she looked at him. Too deliberate in the way she touched him, no matter how she was doing it. She knew that. 

She wasn’t ready to think about it yet. 

“Here’s your next rule,” she said quietly, scratching nails against his scalp. Quiet, but firm. The ends of her words curled up with anticipation. “Eat me out, and don’t come until I tell you to.”

His ribs expanded on a shudder, and forgot to collapse. 

“Can you do that for me?” she asked. His hair was so soft against her palm. His eyes were watery and bluer than they had any right to be. The shape of her hand on his cheek was a filigreed brand.  _ You’re mind, you’re mine, you’re mine.  _ “Can you be that good? Because if you can’t—” a breath. She felt like she was falling, fast and hard and hurtling through the sky. “We’re done.”

“Yes,” he said again, senseless, barely a breath. 

“Ok,” she said, and pulled him forward by the back of his neck. 

She thought he would be too eager, at first. Thought he would surge forward, would go too fast, would be too goal-driven to take his time. 

She was wrong. 

Lips and teeth and tongue. Heat filling up her belly so quickly that she couldn’t help but groan a little, her grip on him tightening with the tight quivering thing she felt building inside of her.

He felt—god,  _ god _ he felt good. 

Ransom answered her moan with one of his own. It vibrated against her, and her head fell back, and her eyes slammed closed for just a second. 

Stars wheeled their way across the backs of her eyelids. 

“That’s it, baby,” she got out. Here she was, calling him that; here she was, with his head between her legs; here she was, wanting nothing more than to take him to pieces. 

Ransom, a collection of broken-mirror edges and wet cobalt eyes and a darkness that she somehow fully understood. 

Ransom: all she had to do was touch him, and he fell apart in her hands. 

He sucked on her clit with sloppy-wet lips, and the pressure filling every molecule of her being built higher—yet it was him letting out those little sounds. Those half-formed whimpers, those tiny whines. 

She wanted him to keep making those sounds. She wanted him. 

That was it. 

“Touch me,” Marta said, in that same command-sharp voice. It came out of a place that she didn’t know was inside her: a place, she thought, only he had ever seen. 

Powerful. She felt powerful. 

He responded immediately. Just like he always did. 

A little gasp as his hands unlocked from behind the small of his back, a sound that rent the stillness of the night-dark room. He was shaking harder than she was, and his head lolled a little as he lifted his arms slowly, like there were weights tied to either wrist. 

Ransom’s hands were warm and huge. He skirted them up the sock-clad expanse of her shins, and then higher, higher, until his palms rested on the bare skin of her thighs. 

The movement of his fingertips brushing the crease of her hip shouldn’t have felt like fireworks spreading across her skin. 

But none of this should have been happening. 

“Good boy,” Marta said, and watched his skin bleed red as he lowered his head once more, and watched the sweat standing on his shoulders like flooded waters glisten in the firelight. 

  
  
  


Marta came on his hand and his tongue and his lips. 

Heat flooding through her. A hand in his hair, pulling tight. Words on her lips that she couldn’t hear. 

It took her a while to come back to herself. To sink back down to earth, and this room they were in, and this man at her feet. 

She was still shaking a little when she dug nails into his neck, when she bent and kissed him with teeth. 

He hadn’t touched himself at all yet. She could taste his tears on her mouth, salty and burning-sharp. 

“Come,” Marta whispered, ragged, and sobbing, he did. 

  
  
  


Here they were. 

It was always going to be like this. They were inevitable: two atoms hurtling toward each other through time and space, unstoppable. She didn’t know when it had started. A year ago, two, three, seven.  _ You were the shore, _ she thought.  _ And I was crashing into you.  _

  
  
  


She leaned him back against the desk. She kissed him, her arms around his neck, and his palms tracing the contours of her ribcage. 

God. She’d never even taken her dress off. 

There was a mess between them—he’d come without her touching him, he’d come without touching  _ himself,  _ she didn’t think she’d ever be able to forget that—but Marta ignored it for now in favor of… of this. Of running her lips over that fading spot on his cheek, of stroking the back of his neck with just the ends of her fingers. 

Ransom’s breath had settled a little, but he was still crying slightly. A slow, steady stream. 

“Are you alright?” she asked quietly. She wasn’t sure what they’d just done—wasn’t sure what it meant—but she knew she needed to check in. She would take care of him, because she had broken him. 

There. Another rule. 

It took him a moment. He had dipped his head forward until his face was nestled in the crook of her neck, and his arms were looped loosely around her waist. She could feel him breathing in her arms, feel the slight hitch when a tremor ran through him. 

“Thank you,” he said finally. His lips brushed her skin. “Thank you.” 

Marta thought of that apology, voiced to her in a motel almost two years ago. 

Marta thought of a million phone calls, a handful of visits. 

Marta thought of the last time they’d been so close in this room. Ransom pressing her down into the carpet beneath that wheel of knives, his body a long line of solid heat atop hers, his gaze unrecognizable from what she was used to now. 

Marta thought of this:  _ I’m in love with you.  _

“Come to bed,” Marta murmured. “Mine.” 

Neither of them would sleep alone again. 

**Author's Note:**

> lol i've never written smut before so this might have been,,, bad? who can say.


End file.
